Onesie ... the people's choice for the word of the year.Source: Supplied

ONESIE word to rule them all.

Yes, "onesie" - denoting the loose-fitting leisure suit - has been deemed the people's choice for the word of the year.

The term beat out a host of other contenders - including fanfic, facepalm, churnalism and enabler - to claim the title, voted by thousands of people who logged on to the Macquarie Dictionary Online in January.

But the official word of 2013 - determined by a committee of bookish types - is 'infovore', denoting a "person who craves information, especially one who takes advantage of their ready access to it on digital devices".

Sound like anyone you know?

Each January, the Macquarie Dictionary announces a word for the year, drawn from a list of new words selected for inclusion in the annual update of the online dictionary.

The committee, which included Macquarie Dictionary editor Susan Butler and Dr Michael Spence, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney, released a short statement to justify their choice.

"The Committee thought that the coinage infovore was a response to the perception that we now had access to information all the time. The smart phone made it possible to find out immediately what we wanted to know. For some people knowing that whatever questions life threw at us the answer was a click or two away was a liberating experience. Indeed they were in danger of becoming addicted to this rush of instant information. This was a word that reflected a significant change in how we conducted our lives."

The committee also gave honourable mentions to "firescape" (denoting a type of landscaping done with the possibility of bushfire in mind) and "cli-fi" (denoting the genre of speculative fiction based on the premise that climate change will give rise to fundamental changes in the way human beings live).

"Each summer now we are constantly aware of a background of major bushfires. In response to this there is a continuing flow of new words related to bushfires and how we deal with them," the committee stated.

"Firescaping is a form of landscaping that reduces the hazard of fire. The other honourable mention went to cli-fi, a neat coinage, and one that is prompted by environmental change. The committee thought that it was fair to say that in all the discussions generated by this topic, no one had predicted a new genre of sci-fi as an outcome."